Richard Halliburton was a misfit, a rebel, in an America that was coming of age in the world. In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most famous persons in America, even more than Amelia Earhart, and today he is forgotten.
He knew many people who would not fit in the handy boxes society offered them. Paul Mooney sailed across the Pacific with him in a Chinese junk. Moye Stephens flew as a stunt pilot in Howard Hughes' silent movies. Elly Beinhorn was Germany's Amelia Earhart. Pancho Barnes founded the Happy Bottom Riding Club. Halliburton met history makers like Lenin's widow and the man who shot the Czar. He chatted with Herbert Hoover, was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Available at Amazon. Also available at Barnes & Noble or other book stores.

Thomas Merton: The Only Known Photograph of God

An avowed rationalist, W.C. Fields was reading a Gideon Bible in a hotel room when his manager entered. "Bill," said the manager, "What the hell are you doing? I thought you were an atheist."
"Just looking for loopholes," said Fields. "Just looking for loopholes."

A Dance to the Secrets of Time and Motion: The Pendulum Wave

Notice that at first the swinging balls form a line, then fall out of sync, forming snakes, squiggles and spirals. Our brains are wired to predict everyday behavior. We need math to understand this. Yet the world blunders on, trusting what is comfortably predictable.

Bats & Echolocation: Ben Underwood Clicks His Tongue To See

Fugue:
My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and
play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only
recognize myself as a symphony.
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of DisquietCounter Fugue:
What I cannot build, I cannot understand.
—Richard Feynman, physicist. as quoted by Craig Venter & encoded as a watermark in DNA of the first ever synthetic organism.

Clouds & ClocksAll they have in common are the first three letters.
You can disassemble clocks. You can reduce them to their parts, then put them back together. You can't do that with clouds. Therein lies the difference between reductionism and emergent systems, as well as reductionism & the unnameable. It depends on your point of view.

More Is Different: EmergenceAs P.W. Anderson had it, here is a broken symmetry. A new level of understanding must be created before we can move on to the next level. You cannot be explained in terms of the particles which compose you.

You are here in the Milky Way Galaxy, 1 of about 100 billion in the visible universe. This is not science-fiction.

We are all conceived in close prison, and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death. . .
But we sleep all the way. From the womb to the grave, we are never thoroughly awake.(John Donne, Sermons)

Foucault Pendulum

In 1851, Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (1819-1868) demonstrated the Earth turning. At the Paris Pantheon, the pendulum revealed reality not as it seems. Human kind
cannot bear very much reality, said TS Eliot. People are comfortable in the way things seem. Some guests in 1851 thought the pendulum moved with Earth stationary. But gravity kept it moving in the same plane as Earth turned along with the building from which it hung. They felt none of it, just as we feel none of the following phenomena. Earth rotates about 1000 mph (1680 kph) on its axis. At 66,000 mph it fully orbits the sun once a year. With Earth & other planets in tow, the sun orbits our Milky Way galaxy at 483,000 mph, completing the orbit every 230 million years. Somehow the pendulum ignores these "local" motions and aligns with its original orientation. How can this be? Nobody understands why it swings relative to the universe as a whole, but that seems to be the case.

8/8/16

Love Within The Machines

Without the brain we would not have consciousness. Does it follow that consciousness is a product of the brain? (An "epiphenomenon of the brain.") The epiphenomenalists would have it so. The reason is clear. Scientific understanding depends on a physicalist explanation for everything. Call it the law of parsimony. The simplest explanations can be the most elegant and the most elegant explanations most often prove the truest.

Ever since Descartes divided mind from body, philosophy and science have united in trying to put them back together. One quite parsimonious philosophy was developed by George Berkeley in which all is mental; all are ideas, rather than physical. This did not become acceptable in mainstream thought because it ran counter to common sense. Common sense has this keyboard I use as a real thing rather than a mental phenomenon. About Berkeley, there is the famous phrase James Boswell attributes to Samuel Johnson, when Boswell told him of Berkeley's view. "Sir, I refute it thus," said Johnson, as he kicked a rock. In fact he did not refute Berkeley. He meant that his shoe caused the rock to fly but Berkeley could point out that all of the phenomena were mental sensations: the feel of his foot against the rock, the view of it flying, the sensation of his leg moving. Rationally, Berkeley's argument is quite neat, quite elegant, as it bundles consciousness with the brain. All is one thing, not two.

We have two things with Descartes, who said that if his leg or arm were cut off his mind would remain intact, which meant body was an inferior element to mind. He was led to a dualistic separation of body from mind and to conclude that mind was his quintessence, saying "I think therefore I am." But how to get from his mind to his body? How to connect between two things? Descartes located the bridge in the pineal gland, a pea-size structure in the mid-brain. He called it "the seat of the soul."

But, and this is a big but. I raise my hand. How did it get raised? How can something soul-like raise something physical? Where is the causal link? We only know that matter moves matter; nothing spiritual does it.

Called The Father of Modern Philosophy, Descartes set up a discussion that continues to this day with scientists insisting that there cannot be dualism, two things. There can only be monism, one thing, which they call the physical. Science cannot advance without physicalist explanations. Claims to anything beyond that can be argued as a mystery, and science dismisses that notion as creating a God of the Gaps.

That is, God is in mystery, a gap regularly closed as science explains phenomena. In the history of science the gap has been closed as we moved from geo-centrism to helio-centrism and from the biblical account of creation in Genesis to Darwin and The Big Bang.

As science has it, a dualistic, a second, mysterious something provides refuge for ignorance and out of ignorance great harm can come. Witness the damage done by religious zealotry.

Which brings us back to the brain and consciousness. As said, from the physicalist vantage, consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain, allowing understanding to be tied up in a neat bundle, so to speak. This is called physical monism as distinct from a dualism such as Descartes'.

What happens to our understanding of ourselves if consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain? Just this. What goes on in our minds is a product of what goes on in the brain. Think about that. Really think about that.

Back in the Nineteenth Century, Darwin's Bulldog, Thomas Huxley saw us as a biological machine. What does that mean? This. "I" believe "I" raise my arm but in fact the brain raises it. "I" believe "I" think a thought but instead the brain produces it. That is what is meant by epiphenomenalism. The machine has no "I," no agency.

What then is going on in our mental world, yours and mine? Nothing, nothing at all. There is no you, no me, to do anything. Our highly vaunted consciousness is a physical product and as such is wholly a result of cause and effect, a quite proper machine. Those thoughts, sensations, loves, fears? They are only a hum in the machine.

Scientific pursuit is only a hum in the machine. With physical monism extended to consciousness science has painted itself into a corner.

Instead of machines, if you want, call ourselves zombies under that physical monist description. Philosopher David Chalmers finds problems with thinking about ourselves as zombies. He points out that it feels like something to be himself. It feels like something to be you, and to be me. Zombies don't feel like anything. Nor do machines.

From Chalmers we get a phrase, The hard problem of consciousness. Part of his meaning is this. Everybody talks about consciousness but nobody can really define it. Here is an explanation I like: Consciousness is the world showing up. The world shows up for me; that's what happens and that's as far as I can go.

As for the hard problem, and here I quote from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "it is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious. It is the problem of explaining why there is “something it is like” for a subject in conscious experience, why conscious mental states “light up” and directly appear to the subject. The usual methods of science involve explanation of functional, dynamical, and structural properties—explanation of what a thing does, how it changes over time, and how it is put together. But even after we have explained the functional, dynamical, and structural properties of the conscious mind, we can still meaningfully ask the question, Why is it conscious? This suggests that an explanation of consciousness will have to go beyond the usual methods of science."

There is no place to conclude on this as no conclusion has been reached--nor ever will be in my estimation. I find the discoveries of brain science fascinating as they reveal much about ourselves we didn't know and indeed they do help us understand ourselves. But as for consciousness I think of the line by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

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Footnote: A philosophical attempt to get at the problem is called property dualism but that is for another post perhaps.

spiritrambler(at)gmail.com

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence. W.B.Yeats

I have had a dream, past the wit of
man to say what dream it was.A Midsummer Night's Dream, Iv, i.&nbsp
On John Van Druten's gravestone

Martians are discussing humans, after one of them has visited Earth:
"These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat. . . .They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat."
"So . . .what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal. Are you getting the picture?"
(From "They're Made out of Meat" by Terry Bisson. Of such a contention, Colin McGinn says we are not equipped to explain the experience of consciousness.)

Douglas Hofstadter:What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

God and the Devil are talking, looking down at the desert where one of God's chosen is having a sacred vision. "You see," says God.” Now you will be out of business because my child has realized the Truth."Not at all," says the Devil. "I will help him organize it."

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/
Is my destroyer./
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose/
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
Dylan Thomas

Time is the school in which we learn.

Time is the fire in which we burn.(Delmore Schwarz)

It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things. &nbsp Ernst Mach

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. Ernest HemingwayI can imagine Jack The Ripper also saying this. John